Drain Tools

A slow shower in a student house is usually hair and soap in the trap. A downstairs floor drain that backs up after rain can be a municipal or a collapsed line. ManjeProp keeps a small set of drain tools for the first job. We do not feed a machine into a stack we have not thought about, and we do not pour a mystery powder on a wet floor and call it closed.

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What we keep in the bakkie

A cup or sink plunger for basins and a larger plunger for a shower tray
A small drum or clock-spring auger that will pass a basin trap and a shower waste, not a 20 m hired machine
A hook or zip-style hair puller for the shower grate people will actually use
Gloves, a bucket, and a cloth we can throw
A torch

We do not keep acid. We do not keep “industrial” openers that etch pipes and skin. We do not keep a camera crawler as a toy.

Order of work

Ask where the water is. One basin, one shower, or every fitting on a stack. One fitting is local. Every fitting is a plumber and maybe the municipality.
Photograph the standing water and the grate, in daylight if you can.
Remove the grate. Pull the hair you can see. That is most student showers.
Plunge with water in the trap, not on a dry waste.
If it still stands, the small auger, gently. If you feel a hard stop that is not hair, stop. Foreign objects and collapsed pipe are not a Friday experiment.
Test. Photograph the result.
If sewage is coming up, or the yard gully is overflowing, stop the household water use you can, ticket as urgent, call the plumber we use. Do not keep pumping a downstairs drain “to see.”

Load-shedding does not cause a blocked trap. Rain can show a storm-water problem. Do not confuse the two.

What tenants should do

A hair catcher in the shower is allowed if it is removable and you empty it. Report a drain that is still slow after you have lifted the grate and removed the obvious hair. Report a fault. Category Water / leak or General maintenance. Photograph the grate and the standing water.

Do not pour grease down a kitchen sink. Do not flush wipes, even if the packet said otherwise. Do not use a bag of crystal opener and then lock the bathroom because of the fumes. Do not dismantle a toilet pan.

You may be charged if a foreign object that is clearly yours is what the plumber brings up. You will not be charged for an old house trap that filled with ordinary hair and we cleared it on a ticket.

Buying

A plunger and a small auger from a hardware counter will do a caretaker kit. Marketplace packs of “25 drain tools” are mostly single-use hooks; one decent hook and a plunger beat a drawer of plastic. Avoid chemicals with no ingredients and “professional 50 m” machines you will not maintain.

This article names no winner and no price. The right tool is the one that comes out of the waste with hair on it and leaves the pipe where it was.

What this is not

It is not a sensor that logs bathroom use. We will not put a “smart drain” in a student stack. We will not collect occupancy data from a trap.

It is not permission to skip a plumber when the stack is the problem. It is not a guarantee that a municipal blockage is our line — we will find out, we will not guess on your TikTok.

Owners: one plunger per house in the locked store saves a call-out for hair. Teach the caretaker the stop point. The stop point is the job.